Well I never... we won!

[Garp]

http://www.ispaawards.org.uk/categories/BestBusiness.htm

Now that was a surprise... though I probably have a pessimistic view of the company because working in support I'm always seeing the faults rather than the xx% of happy users :D

[Dee]

Awesome :)

If my company won something, Id no doubt feel a little proud as well :)

[mejinks]

Could be because the customer experience results and tests come from Purple Sun/Epitiro.

[Garp]

Could be because the customer experience results and tests come from Purple Sun/Epitiro.

Who are they?

[mejinks]

They provide the test data for the ISPAS

Essentially, they give a piece of software to ISPs, who run it on a pc connected to a normal adsl/cable box. It runs tests and reports back the findings, i.e how long a webpage took to open, how long a video file took to download, how long an e-mail took to go through the system...

This info is all collated and it goes from there to be judged. Problem is that half the time, it doesn't always work properly so the data is made up and people like NTL/BT/Clara/Telewest etc fall for it and pay good money to have their balls tickled, when in fact the majority of the data is complete bollocks.

They may have cleaned up their act now, but personally, I wouldn't trust them. Oddly, I think they are the only people who do CEM for ISPs in the UK, so there is not a lot of choice but to use them.

[Garp]

This info is all collated and it goes from there to be judged. Problem is that half the time, it doesn't always work properly so the data is made up and people like NTL/BT/Clara/Telewest etc fall for it and pay good money to have their balls tickled, when in fact the majority of the data is complete bollocks.


Given who are technical bods are and what level they're at I highly doubt they're "falling" for anything. Advertising like being able to claim you're the Best Business ISP is easily stuff worth paying for; the amount of business it'll rake in will offset the cost. I'm not sure how well it will work in other categories though, whether its worth the money or not.

[mejinks]

What you will probably find is that the technical bods aren't fooled, but the data is used by the Marketing department.

Im not dising Clara, but to me the results of the ISPAs are completely worthless as I have an understanding of how poor the data is.

I would guess that the tech bods at Clara are just as tech as the bods at BT/NTL/Telewest/CPW et al, but they have all bought into it.

I used to be tech at BT, because I had been there longer than five minutes, I supported every ISP related product BT had at the time, including Solstra and talk21e, when there were proper customer satisfaction surveys, BT would always be at the bottom of the pile and that confirmed my thoughts at the time of the shoddy way in which ISP products were being run.

You will see the worst as customers only call to get something fixed.